Editorial: The Cheney branch of government

By The MetroWest Daily News

Thursday

Jun 28, 2007 at 12:01 AMJun 28, 2007 at 4:31 PM

The constitutional fact is that the vice president, while clearly a member of the executive branch, has only the powers the president gives him. That means only the president can rein in Dick Cheney - and it's long past time he did.

Having reinvented the vice-presidency, Dick Cheney is now seeking to reinvent the Constitution. Having made himself the most powerful vice president in history, he now insists on being the least accountable.

As detailed in a four-day series in The Washington Post this week, Cheney began breaking the vice-presidential mold before he was even sworn in. He staffed the administration with loyalists and put himself at the heart of the policy-making process. He has used his influence with the president and his knowledge of the bureaucracy to wield enormous power over executive decisions on national security, energy policy, environmental regulation and presidential appointments.

As the first vice president in memory to take office without presidential ambitions of his own, Cheney has been free to ignore his personal unpopularity and pursue his agenda outside the public spotlight. Post reporters, who interviewed some 200 sources for their series, concluded that President George W. Bush makes the big decisions on his own, but Cheney is generally the last adviser in the president's ear and that Bush is happy to leave the detail work to Cheney.

Cheney has made increasing executive power his overriding cause and executive secrecy his abiding passion. ``Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs,'' the Post reports.

That penchant for secrecy is behind Cheney's latest exercise in constitutional mumbo-jumbo. In 1995, President Bill Clinton issued an order intended to ensure that classified data was properly labeled and stored within executive-branch agencies, and established an Information Security Oversight Office within the National Archives to ensure that it was.

Cheney has refused to cooperate with the oversight office, and, when the office instituted formal proceedings, Cheney aides - in a hardball manner said to be typical of the vice president's operatives - tried to have the appeals process eliminated. When that failed, they tried to have the oversight office eliminated altogether.

Cheney's rationale is that because under the Constitution he is president of the Senate, he is actually a member of the legislative, not the executive, branch. Consistency is not Cheney's strong suit: He successfully defended the secrecy of his energy policy task force all the way to the Supreme Court by arguing that Congress has no guaranteed access to information about who is advising the executive branch.

If Cheney really is part of the legislative branch, he ought to watch out, as the Constitution gives great latitude to Congress when it comes to punishing its members. Some House Democrats are going even further, suggesting that, since Cheney's office isn't part of the executive branch, it ought not be funded through the executive branch budget. They are talking about cutting funding for the Cheney operation completely.

They likely will not succeed, nor will those pushing for Cheney's impeachment. There may well be grounds for impeachment, though the legal responsibility for official misconduct rests with the president, not the vice president. But Democrats in Congress, having watched Newt Gingrich's impeachment of Bill Clinton backfire on the Republicans, have little interest in repeating their mistake.

The constitutional fact is that the vice president, while clearly a member of the executive branch, has only the powers the president gives him. That means only the president can rein in Dick Cheney - and it's long past time he did.

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